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Construction After Construction and Its Theoretical Challenges

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Ray Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff*
Affiliation:
Tufts University, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155
*
[ray.jackendoff@tufts.edu]
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Abstract

The English NPN construction, exemplified by construction after construction, is productive with five prepositions—by, for, to, after, and upon—with a variety of meanings, including succession, juxtaposition, and comparison; it also has numerous idiomatic cases. This mixture of regularity and idiosyncrasy lends itself to an account in the spirit of construction grammar, in which the lexicon includes specified syntactic structures matched with meanings. The internal syntactic structure of NPN violates standard principles of phrase structure, and the required identity of the two nouns (in most cases) presents descriptive difficulties. Furthermore, when NPN appears in NP positions, it can take normal NP complements and modifiers, and it has quantificational semantics despite the absence of a lexical quantifier. These peculiarities collectively present interesting challenges to linguistic theory. The best hope lies in a theory of grammar that (i) recognizes meaningful constructions as theoretical entities; (ii) recognizes a continuum of regularity between words and rules; and (iii) recognizes the autonomy of syntax from semantics and vice versa.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 8 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by the Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This article was inspired by the brief discussion of the construction in Williams 1994. It was originally intended as a brief addendum to the Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004 study of the family of resultative constructions, but it rapidly outgrew that context. I am grateful to Adele Goldberg, Peter Culicover, Barbara Citko, Geoffrey Pullum, Paul Postal, Marcel den Dikken, Tetsuya Matsuyama, Ekkehard König, audiences at Stony Brook University and the University of Toronto, and the referees for Language for help in shaping it into its final form.

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